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AccuWeather® Current Conditions for Henrietta, NY Henrietta Bell Wells, the only woman, the only freshman and the last surviving member of the 1930 Wiley College debate team that participated in the first interracial collegiate debate in the United States, died on Feb. 27 in Baytown, Tex. She was 96.

Episcopal Life Online Henrietta Bell Wells, in 2007; first woman on debate team. Her friend Edward Cox confirmed the death.

The story of the team, called the Great Debaters in last year’s movie of the same name, began in 1924 at Wiley College, a small liberal arts college in Marshall, Tex., founded a half century earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate “newly freed men.”

Melvin B. Tolson arrived at the all-black school that autumn to teach English and other subjects. He also started a debate team.

Mr. Tolson, who would win wide distinction as a poet, saw argumentation as a way to cultivate mental alertness. Wiley was soon debating and defeating black colleges two and three times its size.

In 1930, Mr. Tolson decided to break new ground. He managed to schedule a debate with the University of Michigan Law School, an all-white school. Wiley won. Other debates with white schools followed, culminating with Wiley’s 1935 victory over the national champion, the University of Southern California.

Mr. Tolson’s stunningly successful debate team was portrayed in “The Great Debaters,” directed by Denzel Washington. Describing the cinematic young debaters in The Chicago Sun-Times, the critic Roger Ebert wrote, “They are black, proud, single-minded, focused, and they express all this most dramatically in their debating.”

In the fall of 1930, Henrietta Bell, who would later marry Wallace Wells, was a freshman in an English class taught by Mr. Tolson. The professor urged her to try out for the debate team, because she seemed to be able to think on her feet. She was the first woman on the team.

In an interview with The Houston Chronicle in 2007, she said the boys “didn’t seem to mind me.”

But the work was far from easy. Miss Bell attended classes during the day, had three campus jobs and practiced debating at night. The intensity of debating was reflected in Mr. Tolson’s characterization of it as “a blood sport.”

But the hard work paid off. In the interview with The Chronicle, Mrs. Wells declared, “We weren’t intimidated.”

Henrietta Pauline Bell was born on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston on Jan. 11, 1912, and raised by a hard-pressed single mother from the West Indies. When riots broke out in 1917 over police treatment of black soldiers at a World War I training camp, the family’s house was searched. Mrs. Wells recalled being unable to try on clothes in segregated stores.

She did not debate in high school but was valedictorian of her class. She earned a modest scholarship from the Y.M.C.A. to go to Wiley, Episcopal Life reported.

In the spring of 1930, Miss Bell, her teammates and her chaperone arrived at the Seventh Street Theater in Chicago. It was the largest black-owned theater in town, because no large white-owned facility would admit a racially mixed audience, according to an article in The Marshall News-Messenger. Mrs. Wells remembered a standing-room-only crowd.

She wore a dark suit and had her hair cut in a boyish bob. In an interview with Jeffrey Porro, one of the screenwriters of “The Great Debaters,” she felt very small on that very big stage. “I had to use my common sense,” she said.

She remembered Mr. Tolson urging her to punch up her delivery. “You’ve got to put something in there to wake the people up,” he had said.

Mrs. Wells told The Chronicle, “It was a nondecision debate, but we felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation.”

She debated for only one year, because of the need to work for money. She kept up with drama, which Mr. Tolson also coached. After graduating from college, she returned to Houston, where she met Mr. Wells and married. He was a church organist and later an Episcopal minister. She worked as a teacher and social worker.

Mrs. Wells advised Mr. Washington on the movie, using her scrapbooks as visual aids. She urged him to play Mr. Tolson, something he at first was not inclined to do. He called her “another grandma.”

Mr. Wells died in 1987. Mrs. Wells left no immediate survivors.

Her advice to today’s students was straightforward: “Learn to speak well and learn to express yourself effectively.”

She learned this lesson directly from Mr. Tolson, whom she called her crabbiest and best teacher. He was known for issuing intellectual challenges immediately upon entering the classroom.

A typical salutation: “Bell! What is a verb?” Find B Wells Get Immediate Access To Our Database and Find B Wells

www.PeopleFinders.com Did You Intend to Search for: Daniel Bell (American sociologist), Clive Bell (World Artist), Charles Bell (Scottish anatomist & surgeon), Bell (city, California), Cool Papa Bell (American baseball player), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor), bell (musical instrument), John Bell (American statesman), Gertrude Bell (Gospel Artist) Ida B. Wells Jump to:US History Companion| Columbia Encyclopedia| Dictionary| Works Back To TopUS History Companion

Wells-barnett, Ida B.

(1862-1931), anti-lynching crusader, journalist, and advocate for racial justice and women's suffrage. For Wells-Barnett, overcoming racism and halting the violent murder of black men was a central mission among her wide-ranging struggles for justice and human dignity. Born in Mississippi, she was educated at Rust University, actually a high school and industrial school. From 1884 to 1891 she taught in a rural school near Memphis and attended summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville.

A pattern of resistance to racial subordination was set early in her life. In 1887 she purchased a railroad ticket in Memphis and took a seat in the section reserved for whites. When she refused to move, she was bodily thrown off the train. She successfully sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for damages. Upon appeal, however, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the lower court's ruling.

Wells-Barnett cofounded in 1891 the militant newspaper Free Speech in Memphis. She wrote scathing editorials denouncing local whites for lynching black men ostensibly to protect the sanctity of white womanhood but actually to eliminate them as economic competitors. Her pieces provoked a mob to burn her press while she was on a lecture trip to Philadelphia and New York. With a death threat hanging over her in Memphis, Wells-Barnett decided to remain in the North. During her exile, she wrote the pamphlet A Red Record (1895), a statistical account and analysis of three years of lynchings.

Wells-Barnett then launched an international crusade against lynching. She lectured in England in 1893 and 1894. She implored churches and organizations like the Young Women's Christian Association and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union to lend support. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, lawyer and editor of the Chicago Conservator. They raised four children, and she adeptly managed career, marriage, motherhood, and social protest work.

Given the fervor of her determination to end racial discrimination and sexual inequality, it is not surprising that Wells-Barnett played a pivotal role in the development of a local and national network of black women's clubs. President of the Ida B. Wells Club and founder of the Negro Fellowship League and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, Wells-Barnett greatly influenced black life during the Progressive Era. She worked with Jane Addams to block the establishment of segregated public schools in Chicago and served as probation officer from 1913 to 1917 for the Chicago municipal court.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) was formed in 1909, Wells-Barnett insisted that the leadership take an unwavering stand against lynching and years later withdrew when the organization's leadership failed to adopt the militant posture she advocated. She was also unable to persuade leaders in the women's suffrage movement to speak out against racism and denounce lynching. The young white leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association--and especially its southern members--feared that too close an association with black issues would jeopardize their cause. It would not be until 1930, the year before Wells-Barnett's death, that black and white women joined forces to launch the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

Bibliography:

Alfreda M. Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970); Thomas C. Holt, "The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership," in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982), 39-62.

Author:

Darlene Clark Hine

See also Lynching; Suffrage.

The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. See Ida B. Wells on Answers.com 

Jump to:US History Companion| Columbia Encyclopedia| Dictionary| Works Back To TopColumbia Encyclopedia

Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell, 1862–1931, African-American civil-rights advocate and feminist, b. Holly Springs, Miss. Born a slave, she became a part owner of and reporter for the Memphis Free Speech (1889–94), and was famous for her antilynching crusades (see lynching). Bibliography

See her autobiography (1970).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ See Ida B. Wells on Answers.com 

Jump to:US History Companion| Columbia Encyclopedia| Dictionary| Works Back To TopDictionary

Wells, Ida Bell 1862–1931.

American journalist and reformer who campaigned nationwide against lynching and founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1910.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. See Ida B. Wells on Answers.com 

Jump to:US History Companion| Columbia Encyclopedia| Dictionary| Works Back To TopWorks

Works by Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) 1892 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. The first of the pamphlets written by the black journalist and social reformer promotes her antilynching campaign. It would be followed by A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892, 1893, 1894 (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). 1893 The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition--The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbia Literature. Wells-Barnett coauthored and printed this essay to protest the exclusion of African American achievement from the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 1895 A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. This first comprehensive statistical study of lynching in America reveals that in 1893, two hundred blacks had been lynched in America. 1970 Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. The posthumously published memoir of the anti-lynching activist, reporter, and feminist.

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